The Skyscraper Museum

Vertical Wall Street: every building from Broadway to Pearl over the course of 5 eras.
Guess how Wall Street got its name? Yeah, that’s right. Before it was a street it was a wall, built to mark the edge of town in colonial times. Over time original row-houses were replaced by banks and then by financial buildings that only got higher and higher. In fact, many of the buildings on Wall Street today are vertical expansions of sites first erected as many as 150 years ago. In an optimistic turn of phrase, The Skyscraper Museum (don’t worry, I’d never heard of it either) will open “The Rise of Wall Street,” an exhibition with a focus on the good ol’ days of American business, namely the 1850s, when architects set their sites as high as their clients’ financial speculations.